yarn for dinner

A blog about knitting, and some other stuff....

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Remember how I told you it was 70 degrees out? It’s definitely no longer that warm. It’s more like 30 degrees with a wind chill that makes it feel more like 12 (it’s quire windy today).But I’ve been in Florida for the past week visiting family, where it really was more like 70 degrees. And while there I went thirfting. I love thrifting, but there really aren’t any good thrifting places near me. There’s always Goodwill, but I can never seem to find any knitting related items there. Yet at the local church thrift store on Pass-a-Grille island, there always seems to be plenty of crafty things - I attribute this to the over abundance of old ladies in the area. Remember the mystery yarn? I got it here.This time I found no yarn that I especially liked, but I found these beads:

And a dot snappers kit which I find so cool. There aren’t too many snaps left, though, maybe enough for one item. I wonder if I can find more? Or is this kind of snap completely out dated? I’ll have to look into it.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

I have a problem with cold hands, that being if it’s not warm, my hands are cold (so are my feet, but I’ll save that for a blog entry on socks). They’re just always colder than the rest of my body. A lot of the time I don’t even notice it, someone else feels my hands and comments on how I must be freezing, and I say no, this is normal, I’ll let you know when my hands are really cold. This is an excellent power for annoying boyfriends (ha ha, my hands are colder than you would have ever thought possible, let me touch you with them!) But it’s not such a useful power when you have to write a paper, or do just about anything else with your hands (if you can’t feel your fingers, it’s really difficult to type). So, I made a lovely pair of fingerless gloves! I couldn’t find a pattern I liked so I just made these up as I went along.

(Example of how easy it is to write and have warm hands while wearing fingerless gloves)

I was rather attracted to the Fetching pattern that everyone seems to be knitting now, but the yarn I had on hand didn’t quite seem…. delicate enough for such a pretty pattern. Actually, the only yarn I had on hand was my brown cone yarn I talked about a few entries back. I tend to have a very limited stash – unlike just about every other knitter I’ve talked to, I usually only buy yarn when I have a project I want to make. My stash consists of the yarn I have left over when I’m done said project, which in most cases isn’t enough to make anything substantial. I really wanted these in purple, but I was too impatient to wait until I went out and bought some purple yarn, so I worked with what I had, and this is what I had. It’s okay, I like brown too.

Scrunched up gloves pre-washing

I can’t tell you what kind of yarn this is. It’s wool, and it came from a Webs closeout sale. Seeing as it’s cone yarn, it was covered in all that weird yarn goo, which kind of freaked me out when washing:

Find the gloves – or at least find my finger tips….

Nice normal gloves post-washing

In other news, the weather here is driving everyone crazy. Please note: it is WINTER. Where I live, the summers are very hot and the winters are quite cold (I don’t want to say very cold because we really don’t have much of an argument compared to upstate NY or Canada, but we can expect a foot or two of snow and average temperatures in the 30s or 40s). This winter has been more like spring, on Christmas it was in the 60s, and one day last week it was actually 72 degrees! Of course, this week we’re back in the low 40s. So everyone here is very, very confused. And now I’m going to visit family for a week in Florida, just to make everything a bit more confusing….

Thursday, January 04, 2007

For Christmas my parents got me a new camera. It was quite a surprise, as I didn’t ask for one. You see, my previous camera was still in functioning condition, but really only by my standards.... I tend to take my camera everywhere with me. Yup, just about everywhere. It travels from my backpack to my handbag on a regular basis, sometimes in my jacket pocket, or someone else’s pocket. And whatever it gets put in is very often dropped, stepped on, or generally thrown around. So I’m really hard on my cameras, and sadly my last one couldn’t hold up to the challenge - I managed to break the zoom on it. It’s not that the zoom doesn’t work, it’s that I physically broke the button that does the zooming. I can make it zoom in, but to make it zoom back out I need to turn the camera off and turn it back on. And oh, that’s not all, as this button also controls other settings on my camera. For example, I can change my camera setting from “normal” to “fine,” but I can’t change it back - I need to remove the batteries so the camera goes back to it’s default settings. So I guess I can see where my parents got the idea that I needed a new camera, although I would have never admitted it.That’s not saying that I don’t appreciate it. Not at all - I’m completely in love with this camera. The reset time is super fast (with all my old camera’s problems, it’s super slow reset time was probably the most frustrating), I need less light to take pictures without the flash, it takes really detailed pictures, and it’s really small!

So, to prevent this new, amazing camera from suffering the same fate as my last one, I made a camera case!

I have no idea what kind of yarn I used other than “a purple kind”, so just don’t ask.

Alright, so this probably won’t prevent a major catastrophe, but I’m hoping it will stop button breaking and scratches at least. And it looks cool.